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December 15, 2009

While Supremes Ponder, Bilski is Still Slayin' at the Local Level

While the Supreme Court is weighing the merits of In Re Bilski, patent litigators are still using the landmark Federal Circuit ruling to win cases on the ground.

On Friday, Northern District Judge Saundra Armstrong tossed (.pdf) FuzzySharp’s patent lawsuit against 3DLabs, essentially declaring FuzzySharp’s two software patents on improving 3-D computer graphics, a flimsy excuse for an invention with the new case law on the books. Under Bilski, the highly talked-about patent case, the Federal Circuit ruled that methods must either be tied to a machine or transform an article to be patentable — the aptly named “machine or transformation” test.

The lawyers, the logic, and Armstrong's final word, after the jump.

Represented by Dechert’s Jonathan Baker, 3DLabs argued that FuzzySharp’s inventions relating to “Visibility Calculations for 3D Computer Graphics” didn’t pass the Bilski test, calling them pure algorithms and math. This has now become a popular — and successful — defense in patent infringement cases.

FuzzySharp by means of its lawyer, David Fink, of the Texas firm Fink & Johnson, protested that did pass the test because it was tied to a machine, namely a computer. But Armstrong didn’t buy it.

“Fuzzysharp’s arguments miss the mark,” she wrote in the Friday order. “The salient question is not whether the claims are tied to a computer. Rather, as Bilski makes clear, the question is whether the claims are tied to a particular machine.”

Armstrong invalidated the patents and FuzzySharp’s lawsuit against 3DLabs, which in fairness was filed in 2007 before Bilski was decided.

Comments

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